Celtic’s Mis-Firing Strikers And The Mechanics Of Success And Failure.

The oft-told wisdom is that “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” It’s a nice line, but is it true? In a sense it is. Because once you find out what’s survivable you lose a lot of your fear. We dreaded losing that first league title; once it happened, we remembered that the most important title is always the next one and boy, did we enjoy that triumph.

But for a lot people, and institutions, merely surviving isn’t enough.

You have to find the reserves of strength and courage to get back up and carry on, and I understand that for a lot of people the game isn’t worth the candle.

That’s why companies fold after one bad quarter, it’s why people walk away from relationships after one big fight, it’s why so many football clubs sack their managers prematurely and often find themselves in deeper trouble.

Whatever doesn’t kill you can still kill you. If you let it.

The Ibrox manager has tried to fob off his fans with the idea that their Champions League defeats are the elixir whose heady brew will bring future triumph. I know their fans are pretty daft at times but surely even they won’t swallow that?

I argued earlier that if you ignore the results, you can see we’re on the right path. Why aren’t we standing in green fields gazing at the Promised Land already? There are two basic elements to this, but perhaps the most important one is pressure.

Now, this team deals with pressure every single day. When they conceded late against St Johnstone they were under immense pressure. If Giakoumakis doesn’t get that goal we’re genuinely reading “Celtic in crisis” headlines this morning, and we’d be daft not to recognise that as a fact. The press would love to be writing that stuff.

So a certain type of pressure, yes, we’re more than capable of dealing with it.

But it is difficult to shake the feeling that much of what we’ve experienced in the last month or so, domestically as well as in Europe, is simply in the player’s heads.

Look, Kyogo, Maeda and Giakoumakis are all good strikers. Abada, Jota, O’Riley, Haksabanovic, Forrest, Hatate and Turnbull are all good finishers and can be expected to add goals on top of assists. How is it possible that the free-scoring team of earlier in this campaign has simply stopped doing what comes naturally? To me, it’s about pressure.

If you’re decent at putting the ball in the net, and you get a free shot at the keeper in the penalty area the mechanics of actually hitting it where you want it to go do not change whether that chance falls to you in training, or in a public park or in a Champions League final. The actual art of striking the ball cleanly requires the same basic movement of muscles and if you’re a proven scorer as these guys are then you should put it away almost all the time.

But only if no other elements were present in that split second when you have the decision to make about how to strike it and where to put it, and unfortunately that is what changes everything. Because the weight on your shoulders if you’re playing in a Champions League final feels very different from casually hitting a ball into a practice net.

And it’s not impossible that some of these guys – this whole team – have vertigo.

To understand how that happens you have to dig into psychology and physiology and really who has time for that here?

But it’s known that entire teams can be affected by loss of confidence even when it springs, initially, from one area of the pitch. Research mass hysteria, and you’ll see what I mean.

A team gets its swagger from its front men.

Imagine they are misfiring.

The pressure they are under easily leaps to the midfield, to guys who aren’t expected to score every chance in front of goal but now find themselves carrying that burden.

Then defenders who normally never need to worry about their own performances because the team spends so much time on the front foot, and beats teams into submission, suddenly find opposition players playing further up the pitch and where suddenly there are no goals in the plus column to cushion any mistakes those defenders might suddenly make.

Panic spreads through the whole side and before long the cohesion breaks down.

We saw it against St Mirren. We saw it for ten minutes against St Johnstone.

More importantly, we’ve seen it in the two games in Europe against RB.

Unforced errors. Uncharacteristic mistakes. Fear seeming to paralyse players who are normally nerveless.

Giorgios Giakoumakis said something interesting at the weekend, something that was overlooked by most people who listened to him. He said that in the moment St Johnstone equalised he imagined himself scoring the winner.

Whether he knows it or not – and he seems to, because he talked in the same period about his confidence – what he did there was a classic example of something that is not quite self-hypnosis but amounts to the same thing.

Positive visualisation is a technique used by a lot of people in professional sports and in other fields which enables them to get past their fears and self-doubts by focussing not on the potential pitfalls of failure but on the emotions associated with success.

Giakoumakis got up the field thinking about the moment the ball hit the back of the net.

He didn’t leave any room in his head for alternative scenarios like ballooning it over the bar.

This is how guys like Erling Haaland are able to do consistently what other players struggle to, and yes, he has an almost supernatural set of attributes which aid him in that, but really none of those would be in the least bit useful to him if he wasn’t always thinking in terms of success rather than failure.

I bet he never once worries about missing an open goal.

Up in the stands last night, the guys next to me groaned when Maeda missed that early chance and there was a feeling of “it’s going to be one of those nights from him” and yeah, it turned out to be.

The worst part is, if he scores that he approaches the whole rest of the game in a different way. Suddenly he’s got a chance at being the hero instead of being labelled the villain … and that’s two different sets of pressure to deal with.

The very best thing this team could do right now is learn to relax on the pitch again.

To understand that if the goals don’t come early that there’s no need to panic or start to get anxious. Play the game the usual way. Have confidence that they’ll come … and relieve some of the pressure until they do. I think once we get a couple in a game, we’ll hit a cricket score … once we’ve gotten over whatever this is we’ll be back to our free scoring finest.

But pressure is an issue with this team like any team trying to punch above its weight.

Rather than sign some new player in January, the best thing this club could do is invest in a top tier sports psychology department. Do not underestimate that stuff, and if you start to think it’s hocus pocus think for a minute about Giakoumakis and his comments at the weekend.

You can believe in coincidences if you like, but I think it happened because he willed it to happen and saw that moment playing in his head. He has the talent and the predatory skill to get himself into that position for that finish … the rest is about mentality, and he switched his senses on in the seconds before making that run.

He saw it and then he did it.

And that’s where the answer is for the rest of this team.